Drupalstatus.org - A new star on the Drupal sky
For long, I've been using Droptor to get an overview of all my Drupal sites and it's a powerful service that not only gives you an overview but also statistics of your content and several checklists (security, performance, SEO and health) to see how your website is doing. It's great and much needed, but there isn't happening a lot at Droptor. I've submitted several suggestions on how to improve their service and they have applauded them, saying that these suggestions will come in newer versions of Droptor but then ... nothing.
If you, on top of the lack of evolution of the service, add a couple of lengthy outages, and a complete silence on twitter, their support email and other forums things start to add up and present a dark future. What will happen with Droptor? Vim Leers tweeted the other day
@droptor http://t.co/ReiONvTihR is unbearably slow. Even loading the front page takes >1 minute.
— Wim Leers (@wimleers) 11 maj 2014
No response from Droptor there.
When these things start to happen to a service, usually the natural selection kicks in and someone else takes the wheel. A couple of years ago DrupalMonitor from NetNode was released. A promising competitor to Droptor, that takes the good parts from Droptor and adds a nice graphic touch to it. (That is something Droptor really lacks - good design.) Though, development seems to have stalled at Drupalmonitor as well.
Enter, the new kid on the block - DrupalStatus.org.
Drupalstatus.org uses a module called System Status, similar to the modules Drupalmonitor and Droptor are using, to monitor your site. That enables the service to get a small peek (well, a big peek) into your system and then present this information to you in a nice manner. Both Drupalmonitor and Droptor does this of course, but DrupalStatus.org adds a great deal of good-looking graphic. It's also a tiny bit easier to connect your site to DrupalStatus.org.
After you've enabled the module you simply go to the configuration page and choose to add your site to DrupalStatus.org.
A couple of minutes later, after the first necessary information has been gathered, the site will present itself in your DrupalStatus.org listing.
So far, you've got a couple of different listings:
- Sites: A quick overlook that gives you which version of Drupal you're running per site, and the number of modules used.
- Modules: A list of all the modules used, and how many sites that uses each module.
- Individual view. A drilldown of each specific site that shows not only what version of the different modules your site is using, it also lists the recent activity amongst the modules. And of course, it lists all the modules and recommends upgrading some of them...
To sum it up: I applaud this initiative, and though the usage statistics for the module on Drupal.org is quite modest, I see a bright future for the module and the service DrupalStatus.org. Hopefully the service doesn't stop at listing the different modules, but also present more relevant statistics of your site(s).
UPDATE 2014-06-01: Droptor.com has sent out an e-mail stating that they are shutting down within 5 days.